Sound and Music

Rejected by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, La valse (1920) can be seen as an elegy for a vanished world after the First World War. Kubrick used Ligeti’s Atmosphères on the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, drawn to their elemental daring. Dutilleux plays with time in a piece designed as a series of 10 ‘snapshots’. Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka recalls the winter fairs of St Petersburg in a tragic story of love among the puppets.